


Firefly; or, The Truth You Kept

by yuutsuhime



Series: Firefly [4]
Category: Persona 3
Genre: Arisato Minako is Named Ikari Hotaru, Character Study, Closeted Arisato Minako, Gen, Gender Confusion, Gender Dysphoria, Mentioned Parent Death, Platonic Kissing, Queerplatonic Relationships, Sexual Confusion, Slice of Life, Trans Female Arisato Minako, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-14
Updated: 2019-11-14
Packaged: 2021-01-24 15:35:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21340573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuutsuhime/pseuds/yuutsuhime
Summary: The protagonist struggles to come out as a trans woman and finds solace drinking and cuddling with Junpei.
Relationships: Arisato Minako & Iori Junpei, Arisato Minako & Takeba Yukari
Series: Firefly [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1364182
Comments: 1
Kudos: 39





	Firefly; or, The Truth You Kept

**Author's Note:**

> **Content Warning** for realistic hard transfemme experiences.
> 
> Here's Junpei being the one valid cishet.

### i.

You pick the name Ikari Hotaru.

  * 怒り【いかり】 **i·ka·ri** — _noun._ Anger. A word that tastes like blood in your mouth when you bite the inside of your cheeks. It's something you do when the everything grows too powerful around you, when Kanou-sensei calls your legal name for attendance and you answer anyway, as if she wasn't wrong. You eat away at yourself. You crush the world in your teeth.

  * 蛍【ほたる】 **ho·ta·ru** — _noun._ A common firefly (_Luciola cruciata_). As in: sometimes at night, you appear as yourself, a pinprick of femininity somewhere inside your flat chest, and you think: this is the girl you never got to be. This is the girl your parents never got to love. You can see her sometimes, now. You know her name.

### ii.

Your first drink was during summer break, at Mitsuru's father's house, stolen from a wine cabinet that you thought was probably too big even for an adult. You toasted Junpei on the front porch while you hid your irresponsibility in your stomach and washed the cups afterwards.

When you laid your head against Junpei's shoulder, you realized that you could ask to kiss him — but maybe you didn't want to, or maybe you just _wanted_ to want to, or maybe you were just confused and wanted to feel the warmth of another person as you sat on the porch. You looked out over the ocean with your tilted head and fucked up spine and wondered if there was a girl out there like you, but who actually owned a sailor uniform and knew how to use bobby pins. A girl who always had a girl's name, and didn't even have to fight for it.

Instead, your hair is blue and short like a boy's — you live in the denouement of a boy, and you're not cruel enough to call yourself the graveyard of a boy. Maybe you're the girl who moved in to a house a boy left behind. You wonder about where the boy's favorite things went, and the people he used to share his house with, and whether the love that he felt in that house is still stuck behind in the wallpaper glue and the floorboards. You wonder why you have to clean up all the cobwebs the boy didn't manage to. How much pain he must have felt before he left.

When Junpei notices you crying, he asks "you okay, bro" and you reply, "yeah, I'm just drunk".

"I didn't know you were a sad drunk, <s>Minato</s>," Junpei says. "But hey. We've all got our own shit, right? If you ever need somebody to talk to, your old pal Junpei is here."

You smile and say thanks.

### iii.

At the end of summer, Yukari confides in you that she's bisexual, and it's the best and worst thing you've ever felt. Best, because it means she trusts you, even though you're a boy to her. Worst, because Yukari is beautiful and _normal_ and wants to make out with Mitsuru, and reciprocation between them is more likely than anything happening with you.

You like girls, but you don't know if you're a lesbian. Calling yourself a lesbian feels like when you wore a bra you stole from the unclaimed laundry at your old dorm; like an act of theft that didn't fit anyway. How even if Yukari knew you were a girl, she'd still see you as a bastardized version of femininity with a flat chest and a masculinized jaw and too much stubble. It's a combination of dysphoria with the truth — that the damage _is_ permanent, and that you _can't_ be cis, and this is the body you live with.

You tell Yukari that you're happy for her.

Later, your jealousy crawls out of the hole in your heart and lives in the corner of your room and it's so unlike Pharos, so inhuman, so unthreatening that its calm presence scares you all over again. You're afraid because this is normal. Because the truth is that you can only ever be yourself, and you aren't proud of who that person is. You think about Yukari making out with Mitsuru, and how tentative their hands would be when they push into each other; you think about soft caresses over a face, how the face had never had stubble, how the hands had always belonged to them and not to the ghost of a boy.

### iv.

You pick the name Ikari Hotaru.

  * 猪狩【いかり】 **i·ka·ri** — _surname._ You lived in foster care since you were seven. Maybe the name <s>Arisato</s> had stopped meaning anything because nobody was around to share it; you suppose the name had also died in the car. Maybe it goes against Japanese society to forget your family, but then again, you're trans. Your parents never really met you either.

  * 蛍【ほたる】 **ho·ta·ru** — _unisex first name._ You have to submit an assignment by e-mail, so you write your real name just to see what it would look like outside of your head. You feel like you're playing pretend. You submit the assignment as <s>Arisato Minato</s> and the feeling doesn't go away.

### v.

Your second drink on the porch is more confident. You know how alcohol feels going down your throat, how it comes back out in a blush across your face, and you tell Junpei that you care about him a lot. You mean it a bit too much.

"Thanks," Junpei says.

"No, really," you continue. "You're my best friend. Honest. I don't usually have best friends."

"Bro, seriously? I thought you'd have best friends at every school you went."

"Went to too many schools to count," you say. "Eventually I just stopped trying, because saying goodbye hurt too much."

Junpei takes another drink. You're drinking out of the same bottle of ale, and you look out at the ocean and feel the cool breeze across your bare arms and legs. The back of your leg digs against the chipped wood of the stairs. You see clouds of gnats around the lights, hear the crickets and frogs chirping from the dark abstractions of bushes. The world closes in around the reality of sensation, of you, of Junpei, and you lean down and rest your head across his legs to stare past the porch roof at the stars.

"You aren't gonna transfer again at the end of this year, are you?" Junpei asks.

You pause. "Dunno."

"You better not. But if you did, I'd get it. We'd still be friends even if we had to take the train to see each other."

"I know," you say.

You pause again, and then you say, "I think I've just lost too many people to avoid telling them I care. Parents, foster parents. Foster siblings. Friends. Sometimes it's just really hard to let anything end. Especially if you're afraid about what comes next."

"I usually just try not to think about it. And I get it, I'm stupid. I don't make plans for my future or anything."

"You're not stupid."

"I dunno. I just think that school's hard, and so I try _not_ to think about it. We only got two more years left, and then we're out there."

You shrug, and then smile. "I'm still gonna knock on your door at two in the morning to see if you want to play Brawl, no matter where you live. They'll probably have it on the Internet, then, so it'll be easier."

"Damn, you're never gonna let me win, though."

"Nope."

You take a drink, pause your bodies in time and space, and look out past the trees at the blinking lights of fireflies. You're painfully aware of everything — of Junpei — and how you're trans and you've rested your trans body against Junpei's and he _let_ you and didn't even know. You wish that you were a girl in a way that made sense. Like how if Junpei knew you were a girl, you could just call everything between you straight instead of the indeterminate, fucked up cocktail you were too scared to label. You could call it love, and know the girl being loved was actually you, and not the boy he saw you as. You could call it love, at all.

### vi.

You have trouble making excuses.

In the Velvet Room, excuses didn't matter; after paging through your compendium Elizabeth observed that _you seem like a very conflicted girl_, and after you chose a name your signature was already on the contract you signed as if it had always been that way. The Velvet Room, you presumed, was a reflection of your soul that changed and understood your brain exactly the way it was.

When Junpei asks why all your personas are female, you have no answer.

"Maybe <s>he's</s> just a big old girl on the inside," Yukari says, and you smile, leave, and panic on the floor of your room. You wish that you could fall asleep and fall into the Velvet Room instead of having to walk past Yukari again to go all the way to fucking Paulownia Mall in the dead of night.

Instead, you text Yukari.

"Sorry," she responds. "Come back down, Shinji cooked and we miss you. I promise not to question your masculinity again."

"It's not like that," you text. "I'm just uncomfortable when people accuse me of hiding parts of my identity. Like, what if someone accused you of being into girls before you came out as bi?"

"Then they'd be right," Yukari says. "It wouldn't make me uncomfortable, but that's a hypothetical and we're different people. I understand, though. I'll back off."

When you return to the lobby, Junpei smiles at you and winks until Yukari elbows him in the ribs. You grab a plate and sit down next to Junpei and think about how Yukari might know, or how Junpei might know, and you don't know if this is the right time, so you say nothing.

### vii.

You pick the name Ikari Hotaru.

  * 怒り【いかり】 **i·ka·ri** — _noun._ Hatred. As in — how any article of women's clothing you buy is scanned as "men's shirts" or "men's bottoms" at the checkout and you blame yourself instead of the cashier. As in, if you figured anything out when you were twelve this wouldn't have happened to your body, and you blame yourself for that, too. As in, this world was designed to kill you and you turned the pain inwards, turned it into your blood, and gave it back in brief expressions of a girl.

  * 蛍【ほたる】 **ho·ta·ru** — _noun._ A pinprick of light seen from the front steps of Mitsuru's father's beach house in the late, humid evening. How you could reach out to touch it, if it would let you. How it was too scared and turned away.

### ix.

The third time you get drunk with Junpei, you ask if he's ever kissed anyone before.

"Not yet," he says. "Although there's this girl who's sometimes drawing down at Port Island."

"I feel that," you say. "There's a girl in library club sometimes that I've thought about kissing. Don't think it's the right idea, though. She's probably a lesbian. It sucks."

"How do you know?"

"Just instinct," you lie.

"I dunno," Junpei says. "You gotta be honest with people, man. Tell them the truth. It's gotta mean something to wear your heart on your sleeve."

You think for a bit about how 'lesbian' doesn't fit you because your body doesn't fit you, and how everything could fall apart if you did anything. How love could wither and die if you let it.

"You're probably right," you say. "Honestly, there's a lot of people I should tell the truth to."

"Hey, I'm all ears," Junpei says.

You sit up, stretching your back out of the position you'd slumped against Junpei's shoulder, and you look at Junpei, maybe for the first real time. You look into his eyes, lean in halfway, and let him complete the kiss. It tastes like the alcohol you shared and feels like stubble and you realize that you probably genuinely don't want to date him. You don't regret it.

"Bro, what are we doing," Junpei laughs.

"I don't really know. Just felt right."

"Damn, I don't know what we are," Junpei says. "That was gay, wasn't it?"

"Dunno," you say. "Not really sure what anything is, anymore."

"I get that," Junpei says. "Gotta be honest, I don't think I'm gay though."

You laugh. "I honestly don't know what I am."

"Hey, you'll figure it out," Junpei says. "I got your back, you know?"

"Alright," you laugh, and lean your back against Junpei's arm again, surrounding yourself with the wind and the darkness and the fireflies. You don't even bite your lips. You don't pretend.

**Author's Note:**

> There's nine chapters because I'm a slut for symbolism and Arcana IX is the Hermit (i.e. being in the closet).


End file.
